There will be no edition tomorrow because of the Bank Holiday. Back to normal on Tuesday.

Life

Cornwell at the shooting range in 1992. William F Campbell/Getty

The bestselling crime writer who has always feared for her life

The bestselling crime writer Patricia Cornwell has a “dark imagination”, says Janice Turner in The Times Magazine. While you’re ordering a margarita, she’s scoping out potential shooters at the bar. When I first interviewed her in 2008, she turned up with an armed former Marine and never walked her dog without a pistol. She doesn’t do crowds – “not because of somebody coming after me, but just being in the wrong place at the wrong time” – and always makes sure she has a landline in case criminals jam her mobile. Yet this deep-rooted paranoia is entirely understandable when you consider her “gothic childhood”.

Born in Miami, she was five when her father walked out on Christmas Day. Her depressed mother retreated to her bed, leaving her and her two brothers to “scrounge for food”. While “running feral”, Cornwell was abducted by a security guard – she “remembers vividly” her little red shorts being produced in court as evidence. Her father later tried and failed to kidnap the children, after which her mother made them perform “evacuation drills” at home. At 25, she began writing her crime thrillers, which have sold 120 million copies, after a dream in which Agatha Christie told her: “You will replace me.” But the drama in her personal life continued. She was outed as gay in “spectacular Cornwell style” after a brief affair with a female FBI agent: her lover’s husband, also with the FBI, found out, strapped on a fake bomb and tried to kidnap his wife in a church. Cornwell’s life is calmer now, but the darkness remains. When asked how she’d kill someone if she had to, she replies that she’d shoot them. “But I don’t really like taking on the persona of the killer,” she says. “I think it’s dangerous. Be careful what you think about.”

🚁☠️ Cornwell always likes to “crash-test” her plots. She signed up as a volunteer cop so that she could view autopsies, and learned to ride motorbikes and fly a helicopter to write her heroine Kay Scarpetta’s “action-lesbian” niece. For her next novel, she sniffed cyanide. “I want to feel it while I’m writing it,” she says. “Experience is energising.”

True Crime: a Memoir by Patricia Cornwell is available for pre-order here.

Advertisement

The winds of change: China, technology, and the energy transition
The article argues that while China is often associated with heavy fossil‑fuel use and high emissions, it has rapidly become a global leader in the energy transition, particularly in renewables such as electric vehicles, batteries, solar and wind power. Driven by strategic government support for advanced technology, a desire to project environmental “soft power,” and long‑standing strengths in large‑scale industrialisation, China has moved from imitation to genuine innovation in green technologies. Capital at risk. Read more.

Property

THE LOS ANGELES ESTATE This 70,000 sq ft mega-mansion with views across downtown Los Angeles to the Pacific is “basically Bel Air’s answer to Versailles”, says Country Life. Spread across three buildings on eight acres of almost completely flat land – a rarity in the LA hills – it has 39 bedrooms and 50 bathrooms (albeit many of them for staff). Facilities include a cinema, beauty salon, spa, pilates studio, pizza oven, eight butlers’ pantries, garaging for 25 cars and, just in case, an X-ray room. Bel Air Country Club is essentially on the doorstep. $400m. Click on the image to see the listing.

Tomorrow’s world

AI taking over, as imagined by ChatGPT

Ignore the AI doomsters at your peril

Here are just a few of the developments we have seen in AI in the past 60 days, say Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei in Axios. The technology has become “the fastest-growing product category in world history”, with Anthropic’s annualised revenue rising from $9bn to $30bn in a matter of months. No company ever – Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, tech-boom Google, pandemic era Zoom – has scaled that quickly. Meanwhile software companies lost a combined $2trn in market capitalisation in just 10 weeks, as people realised that AI could do much of the work instead. “That’s more, relative to the market, than the dot-com bust or the 2008 financial crisis.”

Anthropic has also built a model so powerful it has refused to release it to the general public. (“Others might not do the same.”) And it has done so using code written pretty much entirely by AI – in other words, the world’s most powerful AI coding models are now “building themselves”. In a normal industry, any one of these would be “the business story of the decade”. But AI isn’t normal, not least because it’s still understood by so few. Some science fiction-style writing about the possible consequences of the technology – triggering a global economic collapse, say, or undertaking “the harvesting of humanity’s brains” – has broken out into the wider public consciousness. And while these doomster predictions probably won’t happen, no one can promise that they can’t. “We’ve no clue where this ends.” What’s clear is that society, workers, academic institutions and governments aren’t “remotely ready” for what’s unfolding. If you’re not thinking about how this “transformative, awe-inspiring” technology will affect you – your work, your children’s education, everything – you’re doing something wrong. “We have been warned.”

💰☢️ In the first three months of the year, says Karen Weise in The New York Times, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta ploughed a combined $130.65bn into capital expenditure, the majority of it on data centres for AI. That’s “more than three times what the Manhattan Project cost to develop nuclear bombs”.

Enjoying The Knowledge?
Click below to share

Share via WhatsApp
Share via email

Recipes

Geoffroy van der Hasselt/AFP/Getty

“Sometimes, in the search for originality, the most obvious dishes are forgotten.” So begins Elizabeth David’s recipe for oeuf mayonnaise, in her book French Provincial Cooking. She goes on to apologise for including a recipe so basic, but I think it easily rewards taking seriously, says Olivia Potts in The Spectator. This classic of the French bistro – unjustly humbled by the global reach of the steak tartare or onion soup – requires eggs boiled to jammy-yolked perfection: simmered for eight-and-a-half minutes then plunged in ice water to arrest cooking, and served whole or halved. The accompanying mayonnaise – softer than the stuff in the jar – takes a full, rather satisfying, 10 minutes: whisk together an egg yolk, one tablespoon of white wine vinegar and one of Dijon mustard, then gradually drip 200ml of neutral oil (rapeseed works well), whisking all the time, until it sits up like thick cream. Combine, salt, and serve.

The Knowledge Crossword

Click here for today’s puzzle

Comment

Pakistani Muslims burning an Israeli flag during a demonstration in 2006. Tariq Mahmood/AFP/Getty

Pakistan’s self-destructive hatred of Israel

Pakistan’s critical role hosting US-Iran peace talks has given the nuclear-armed nation a new prominence, says Sadanand Dhume in The Wall Street Journal. But if it hopes that this will bolster its position on the world stage, it will first need to reconsider its “visceral hostility toward Israel”. Earlier this month, Pakistan’s defence minister posted a now-deleted tweet calling the Jewish state “cancerous” and a “curse for humanity”. Pakistanis “overwhelmingly” dislike Israel: a 2023 Gallup poll found that just 2% sympathised with the nation. Every Pakistani passport says it is “valid for all countries of the world except Israel”.

Over the decades, Pakistan has “extended a welcome mat” to violent anti-Israel and anti-America malcontents. In the 1980s, it became home for the prominent Palestinian jihadist Abdullah Azzam; in 2011, the US discovered Osama bin Laden hiding less than a mile from Pakistan’s leading military academy. The Muslim nation has also sought to bolster Israel’s Arab neighbours. Pakistani pilots reportedly flew Arab fighter jets in the Six-Day and Yom Kippur wars, and former prime minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto promised to send Pakistani troops to Syria to defend the dictator Hafez al-Assad. There are good reasons for Pakistan to “reverse course”. It has become the “sick man” of the Indian subcontinent, dependent on frequent bailouts from the IMF, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Jettisoning antipathy towards Israel could help it to “prosper in the modern world”, as India did in the early 1990s. Pakistanis often frame normalisation as doing Israel – and by extension, the US – a favour. In reality, “Islamabad would be doing itself a favour”.

Quoted

“The factory of the future will have only two employees: a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.”
Management guru Warren Bennis

That’s it. You’re done.

Let us know what you thought of today’s issue by replying to this email
To find out about advertising and partnerships, click here
Been forwarded this newsletter? Try it for free
Enjoying The Knowledge? Click to share

Reply

Avatar

or to participate

Keep Reading